When one has a number of incredibly bright and detailed superbubbles in the Large Magellanic Cloud to feast one’s eyes on, the faint and delicate amorphous glow of N70 is a very rewarding sight in the telescope. It is a textbook example of an isolated superbubble, but surprisingly not difficult to locate for it is large (~7′ in diameter) and it lies in an area of the Cloud that is sufficiently free from obscuring nebulae to allow it to stand out well from the background, even though it is faint, translucent and wispy. To fully appreciate this fascinating but faint object one needs a dark sky, good dark adaptation and lots of averted vision. And with its low surface brightness, this is also one of those objects you need to spend a lot of time with, allowing your eyes and brain to adjust to the scene. The longer one looks, the more details emerge of this most delicate of superbubbles.

16″ at 228x: N70 is powered by the OB association LH 114, which appears as a small but beautiful handful of stars. Most of the stars lie in LH 114’s heart – the open cluster SL 673 – which looks remarkably like a miniature M18… a charming find in this glorious Cloud! The rest of LH 114’s resolved stars lie just north of SL 673 and appear as a few tiny glints of fine stardust mingled with a faint hazy glow of unresolved starlight. Very lovely!

One uses the term “ghostly” often to describe the merest wisps of faintest nebulous light, but I found that without a filter, N70 was ghostly in the most wonderfully B-rated ghost-movie style… the longer one looks, and using wandering averted vision, more of N70’s faint and fragmented ring, and even fainter nebulous tendrils, strands, wisps and smudges seem to slowly materialise from the background gloom like ectoplasm. Dramatic stuff!

N70 has an excellent response to the UHC filter. The rim of the superbubble is almost perfectly spherical, although it is far from even, and the edges have some superb differences. The western edge was by far the brightest, a beautiful but faint filigree of wisps and curls, with one beautifully brighter wispy arc of very faint nebulosity almost due west. To the north the wispy filigree appears to fuse into a couple of relatively bright strands that then fade into a few extremely faint – indeed, almost-transparent – wisps on the eastern edge. The southern edge is very diffuse and smudgy looking and disappears entirely on the southeast “corner” of the circular ribbon of nebulosity. The interior of the superbubble has a few extremely faint smudges of the very palest nebulosity, with the tiny cluster embedded in a slightly brighter smear.

Faint and challenging as the ethereal superbubble is, it leaves one awe-struck that one can sit at a telescope in a scrubby African desert and witness an astounding part of the extraordinary trajectory of life, death, and cycles of renewal in another galaxy.